MATERIALITIES OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING: A CONVERSATION WITH AAAAARG, CHTO DELAT?, I CITE, MUTE, AND NEURAL Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dmitry Vilensky Abstract This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print. Keywords independent publishing, art publishing, activist publishing, digital archive, blog, magazine, newspaper BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND ACT Nicholas Thoburn (NT) In one way or another all of you have an investment in publishing as a political practice, where publishing might be understood loosely as a political ‘gesture’ located ‘between the realm of discourse and the material act’.1 And in large measure, this takes the path of critical intervention 1. Nat Muller and Alessandro in the form of the media with which you work - newspaper, blog, magazine, Ludovico, ‘Of and digital archive. That is, media come forward in your publishing practice Process and Gestures: A and writing as complex sets of materials, capacities, and effects, and as sites Publishing Act’, in of political intervention and critical reflection. Alessandro Ludovico and Natt Muller The aim of this conversation is to concentrate on these materials, (eds) The Mag.net capacities, and effects of independent media (a term, ‘independent media’, Reader 3, London, OpenMute, p6. that I use advisedly, given its somewhat pre-digital associations and a nagging feeling that it lacks purchase on the complexity of convergent media environments). I’m keen as much as possible to keep each of your specific DOI:10.3898/NEWF.78.08.2013 MATERIALITIES OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING 157 publishing projects at the forefront of the conversation, to convey a strong sense of their ‘materialities’: the technical and aesthetic forms and materials they mobilise; what strategies of authorship, editorship, or collectivity they employ; how they relate to publics, laws, media paradigms, financial structures; how they model or represent their media form, and so on. To start us off, I would like to invite each of you to introduce your publishing project with a few sentences: its aims, the mediums it uses, where it’s located, when established - that kind of thing. Jodi Dean (JD) I started my blog, I Cite, in January 2005. It’s on the Typepad platform. I pay about 20 dollars a year for some extra features. I first started the blog so that I could ‘talk’ to people in a format that was not an academic article or an email. Or maybe it’s better to say that I was looking for a medium in which to write, where what I was writing was not immediately constrained by the form of an academic piece, written alone, appearing once and late, if at all, or by the form of an email which is generally of a message sent to specific people, who may or may not appreciate being hailed or spammed every time something occurs to me. There was another reason for starting the blog, though. I had already begun formulating my critique of communicative capitalism (in the book 2. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret and in a couple of articles).2 I was critical of the way that Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture participatory media entraps people into a media mentality, a 24/7 mindset Capitalizes on of reaching an audience and competing with the mainstream press. I thought Democracy, London, Cornell University that if my critique is going to be worth anything, I better have more firsthand Press, 2002. experience, from the very belly of the beast. Alessandro Ludovico (AL) I’m the editor in chief of Neural, a printed and online magazine established in 1993 in Bari (Italy) dealing with new media art, electronic music and hacktivism. It’s a publication which beyond being committed to its topics, always experimented with publishing in various ways. Furthermore, I’m one of the founders (together with Simon Worthington of Mute and a few others) of Mag.net, electronic cultural publishers, a network of magazines related to new media art whose slogan is: ‘collaboration is better than competition’. Finally, I’m finishing a book called Post-Digital Print, about the historical and contemporary relationship between offline 3. Alessandro and online publishing.3 Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since Sean Dockray (SD) About five years ago, I wrote this description: 1894, Eindhoven, Onomatopee, 2012. AAAARG is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal. AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, 158 NEW FORMATIONS imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them. More straightforwardly, the project is a website where people share texts: usually PDFs, anything from a couple of inspiring pages to a book or a collection of essays. The people who use the site tend to be writers, artists, organizers, activists, curators, architects, librarians, publishers, designers, philosophers, teachers, or students themselves. Although the texts are most often in the domain of critical or political theory, there are also technical documents, legal decisions, works of fiction, government declarations, poetry collections and so on. There is no moderation. It’s hard to imagine it now as anything other than it is - which is really a library, and not a school, a reading group, or a journal! Still, AAAARG supports quite a few self-organised reading groups, it spawned a sister project called The Public School, and now produces a small online publication, ‘Contents’. It’s used by many people in many ways, and even when that use is ‘finished,’ the texts remain available on the site for others to use as a shared resource. Dmitry Vilensky (DV) The workgroup Chto Delat? (What Is to Be Done?) has been publishing a newspaper, of the same name, since 2003. The newspaper was edited by myself and David Riff (2003-2008) in collaboration with the workgroup Chto Delat?, and since 2008 is mostly edited by me in collaboration with other members of the group. The newspaper is bilingual (Russian and English), and appears on an irregular basis (roughly 4-5 times a year). It varies between 16 and 24 pages (A3). Its editions (1,000-9,000 copies) are distributed for free at different cultural events, exhibitions, social forums, political gatherings, and universities, but it has no fixed network of distribution. At the moment, with an on-line audience much bigger than that for the paper version of the newspaper, we concentrate more on newspapers as part of the exhibition and contextualisation of our work - a continuation of art by other means. Each newspaper addresses a theme or problem central to the search for new political subjectivities, and their impact on art, activism, philosophy, and cultural theory. So far, the rubrics and sections of the paper have followed a free format, depending on theme at hand. There are no exhibition reviews. The focus is on the local Russian situation, which the newspaper tries to link to a broader international context. Contributors include artists, art theorists, philosophers, activists, and writers from Russia, Western Europe and the United States. It is also important to focus on the role of publication as translation device, something that is really important in the Russian situation – to introduce different voices and languages and also to have a voice in different international debates from a local perspective. MATERIALITIES OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING 159 Pauline van Mourik Broekman (PvMB) After so many years - we’ve been at it for 17! - I seem to find it harder and harder to figure out what ‘Mute’ is. But sticking to the basic narrative for the moment, it formed as an artist-initiated publication engaging with the question of what new technologies (read: the internet and convergent media) meant for artistic production; asking whether, or to what degree, the internet’s promise of a radically democratised space, where a range of gate-keepers might be challenged, would upset the ‘art system’ as was (and sadly, still is). Since that founding moment in 1994, when Mute appeared appropriating the format of the Financial Times, as producers we have gradually been forced to engage much more seriously - and materially - with the realities of Publishing with a capital ‘P’. Having tried out six different physical formats in an attempt to create a sustainable niche for Mute’s critical content - which meanwhile moved far beyond its founding questions - our production apparatus now finds itself strangely distended across a variety of geographic, institutional, professional and social spaces, ranging from the German Leuphana University (with whom we have recently started an intensive collaboration), to a series of active email lists, to a small office in London’s Soho. It will be interesting to see what effect this enforced virtualisation, which is predominantly a response to losing our 4 4.